B2C Email Analytics

Measuring Marketing Performance in Google Analytics

The most important use case of Google Analytics for marketers is to be able to measure marketing performance. This lesson will show you how to measure performance of your overall marketing strategy, of your channels and of your individual campaigns.

Measuring Performance of your Marketing Strategy in Google Analytics

As we discussed previously, the most common metrics to measure the performance of your overall marketing strategy are: brand awareness, traffic, signups, conversions, revenue and ROI.

Note that while most of these metrics can be measured through Google Analytics, brand awareness and ROI unfortunately can’t. Of the remaining metrics, traffic is automatically tracked, but the rest require setting goals and/or Ecommerce tracking as discussed in the previous lesson.

Acquisition Overview Report

To view your overall performance metrics in Google Analytics:

Navigate to Acquisition – Overview

Set the date to the desired time period. If you want to follow along with the video, set Jan 1, 2018 – Feb 28, 2018

The first section gives you a snapshot of your traffic by channel and trends users and conversion rate over time

The next section is a table with many metrics including the ones we’ve discussed. While the table also breaks down the metrics by channel, ignore that part for now (there’s a better report for this discussed next) and look at the top line which is the aggregate performance across all marketing channels

Measuring Performance by Traffic Channel in Google Analytics

Channels Report

One of the most useful reports in Google Analytics is the Channels report. It gives you performance metrics by each of your traffic sources (channels). To get to it:

Navigate to Acquisition – All Traffic – Channels

First you see a chart of users (traffic) over time. You can add other metrics to the plot

Next is the table that gives you performance metric by channel. Since the demo account has Ecommerce tracking, you can see purchases and revenue by channel. You could also see conversion rate of other goals that have been defined by changing the goal in the Conversions drop down menu on the top right of the chart

Measuring Campaign Performance in Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a great tool for measuring performance of your campaigns, but it is limited to actions that happen once a user lands on your site. Thus, metrics that are higher in the marketing funnel (reach, engagement) can’t be measured through Google Analytics. Instead, you’ll have to use the analytics tools of the individual advertising platforms. We’ll review some of the most common ones in later sections of this course.

In order for your campaigns to be categorized correctly in Google Analytics, you need to have set up your UTM tracking following their campaign conventions.

To measure the on-site performance of your tracked campaigns:

Navigate to Acquisition – Campaigns – All Campaigns

Set the date to the desired time period. If you want to follow along with the video, set May 3, 2018 – May 9, 2018

The top chart trends users (traffic) over time across all of your campaigns

The table at the bottom lists all of your campaigns. The name of the campaign corresponds to the utm_campaign parameter you used in your tracking. The table gives you many performance metrics of your campaign including acquisition, behavior and conversion metrics

If you’ve used the same campaign name across multiple types of ads, you may want to add the Source/Medium as a secondary dimension to tell them apart

Conclusion

No matter what analytics platform you use, make sure you follow the correct tracking conventions and that you are consistent with your tracking. Tools like Google Analytics are very powerful and can provide you with very insightful information, but only if they can identify the traffic coming to your site.